Causa Mortis
by BOC42
Summary: Causa mortis: an anticipation of death. Ten vignettes from the cancer arc.
1. stop

Disclaimer: I do not own the X-Files, Scully, Mulder, or even a Lariat bumper sticker. Thank you for reading.

/stop/ scully

/

His eyes have that hint of confusion around the edges, accentuated by his heavy low brow. His question echoes in my ear. _Are you all right?_

He does not mean in general. He means today, this hour. He is so good to remember that I am still alive.

Don't bury me yet.

I shrug across the desk and try to explain. "Not today, Mulder. Sometimes… sometimes I'm so busy living that I forget I'm dying. It sneaks up on me. And other times, I'm so aware of dying that it's hard to remember I'm still alive."

He nods and leans on the desk, intent. "And today?"

Today is more complex than the juxtaposition I've just given him, though it was true. "Today I'm so tired from living that I would like to slow down and live a little slower. I need to catch my breath, Mulder."

Strategy. I know that I cannot go on indefinitely, and that pushing too hard will only hasten the end. I want to enjoy the time, not just fill it.

"What can I do, Scully?" His voice is an earnest whisper. "I care about you. What do you want?"

My answer is un-meditated, and I have said it before. "I want to stop, Mulder. I want to stop."

He knows I do not mean stop fighting, stop working, or stop searching for the truth. I just want to stop running. Just for today.

"All right."

He stands and comes around the desk, offering me his hand. "Today we stop, Scully." He pulls me to my feet. "Today we stop and drink coffee and watch the Weather Channel. Then we'll stop and feed the ducks at the pond. After that we'll stop at the animal shelter and walk a dog. We can stop for ice cream. We can stop and watch whatever movie you pick at Blockbusters. Today we stop."

My heart is so full it falsely promises to never stop.


	2. living with ghosts

/living with ghosts/ mulder

/

I whisper it to her one windy night, across a linoleum table and French fries.

"I'm afraid of losing you, Scully."

She looks up from her diet soda, green eyes tonight instead of blue. She swallows slowly before answering. "You're not going to lose me, Mulder."

Her blatant lie hurts me, and I know she can see the pain on my face.

The side of her mouth lifts slightly in resignation and she reaches across the stack of napkins for my hand. I hold it tightly.

Her voice is soft. "I have never met your sister. And yet I know Samantha. I know her personality, her temperament. I know how she looks and thinks and acts. I see the influence that she continues to have on you every day, just as if she was alive. Mulder, your love and devotion to Samantha let her live. She has grown up, she went to college, and she knows happiness and accomplishment and joy and humor through you, because she is with you everywhere you go. You have never let her become a person trapped in the past. You keep her alive. And I think you'll keep me alive too."

She gives me a half grin. "Ten years from now the entire X-Files division will still be putting up with my skepticism and rationalism – through the unlikely source of Fox Mulder."

I can't help but chuckle, even though I know in my heart that she is right. She will always be alive in the sense that I will carry her with me every day for the rest of my life. "The entire X-Files division?"

She shrugs. "Well, it's going to take a lot of people to replace me."

I squeeze her hand and we laugh.


	3. packing

/packing/ mulder

/

I look at her and notice how pale she has become. A small, spectral presence that shadows me, fitting just below my shoulder. I watch her transform slowly into a ghost. She has spread out around the office: red glinting out of sunbeams, a skirt brushing around the desk corner, a white face in the corner behind the door. She is growing.

Some days the spreading out feels to me like her stubborn and vital spirit is reaching out to take up as much of time and space as possible. She is not just walking at my side, but her spirit is wrapping both of us in a bright halo of sunlight, buzzing with motion and anticipation. There are moments when it is overwhelming in its exhausted power.

Other days, I see parts of her sneaking away from us. The spreading out is a thinning, a weeding out. The lesser-used parts of her are slowly being filtered out of her body to make more room for pain, for cancer, maybe for time. Her spirit is strategically inventorying its parts and choosing what is necessary for a little longer. Like packing away Christmas decorations, unread books, or extra silverware into boxes weeks before you plan on moving. Just to get it out of the way.

Eventually the photographs and the toaster will be boxed up, along with the smiles and high heels and pencil skirts. All that will be left is the squeezed out toothpaste tube and an equally depleted body.

And me. Rattling around in the vacancy.


	4. time

/time/ scully

/

Why?

I see the unasked question in his eyes for days. A week. Why did I let him get so close?

We drive through rural Texas, but I see us driving through a vast and unending emptiness. It comforts me even as it saddens.

It is like me. With each passing day I feel myself grow heavier with uncertainty, with anger, with heartbreak, with regret, with uneasiness, with aloneness. I should be growing lighter, shedding emotions and unnecessary feelings, but every day I am heavier.

This land is enormous and empty and as long as we drive we never reach anyplace. There is a destination, but it is unspoken, unknown, but certain. We are meant to spend our lives moving toward it. And yet the emptiness only grows the further we drive into it, just as my soul grows heavier the closer I come to the inevitable.

But Texas, this car, this drive, it has one thing that I do not have much of: time. Earth will turn in the heavens, the car can be refueled, and the expanse of the road is endless. And I envy them all, because I am only a fleeting passenger now, and I must get out of the car before we reach our destination.

With his eyes uncharacteristically intent upon the road, he asks it quietly.

"Why?"

Taking up his cue, I remain transfixed by the passing fence posts. Why did I let 'him' slide across my couch? Why did I open my lips to meet 'his', hesitant but pliant?

"Time," I answer him.

After a silence, he prods further. "Time for love? A family?"

"No," I tell him. He is both of those things to me and he understands this. "For all the time we won't have."

His eyes close for a moment and his jaw clenches.

I reach out and take his right hand from the steering wheel and hold it beside the cup holder, my wrist brushing the sunflower seed bag.

And we keep driving.


	5. apollo

/Apollo/ mulder

/

The three a.m. hunger has struck, and I am ducking under fluorescent lighting to find the last box of Wheat Thins in Cooke county, Texas. She is waiting in the car, dozing under the buzzing lamppost with a thin haze of mist surrounding the car. She looks vulnerable in that green light. I felt sick leaving her and walking through the wind to the concrete building.

The clerk is watching me closely. She is probably more comfortable with the rough-looking men who haunt her convenience store than the well-dressed ones.

The lights go out. It must be the windstorm. I hear the clerk say that the generator will kick on; to give it a minute.

I unbend from the middle shelf and turn to the window. The green light in the parking lot has extinguished itself, letting the washed out moonlight settle around our car. I can see Scully from here: head leaned against the window, mouth slightly open. It's how she sleeps in cars. The moonlight is kinder to her fading skin than the lamp. I see her paleness, her stark realness that sometimes escapes even me. She carries an aura so large that it covers all human frailties. All cancers. But then she sleeps. And it drops away, unneeded.

I fight an urge to weep as a cloud obscures the moon and I can no longer see her. Irrationally, desperately, and momentarily, I need to be with her immediately. The urges to protect her against the unseen have grown stronger in the past weeks, and I know she sees this. And every time I indulge them and turn to her, consuming her with my eyes and ears and nose and she almost always stops me just before I can reach out to her.

Don't worry, Mulder.

I could stop breathing more easily.

She _almost_ always stops me from touching her. Except twice: once, when her nose bled badly, and another day when she nearly passed out on the stairs. And both times feeling her warm under my hands felt like a reassuring triumph, like landing on the moon. The cancer is a challenge to be beat, and in those moments, I beat it.

The lights come back on, an assault on my pounding head and heart. I hear the clerk say the register is working. Wanting only to return to the car, I hand the woman a ten and escape through the glass door with her hollering about my change.

Keep it. I don't want my change. Tonight I want the moon.


	6. red

Post-demons

/red/ mulder

/

Red.

In cultures around the world it has come to symbolize life: vitality, fertility, bravery, and strength. I myself have been acculturated to associate red with these things.

But red is so much more. So complicated.

Red is the color I cannot see.

Red is my favorite color.

Red is the color I hate.

Red is swinging, and bouncing, and following right behind me.

Red is the thin strands I find on my jacket sleeve and couch.

Red is the bright stain beneath her nose and the automatic hand coming to hide it.

Red is the color that has drained out of her cheeks.

Red is the pause for breath after the third flight of stairs.

Red is the glass vial in a freezer.

Red is the mark on the back of her neck.

Red is the sound of angry doors and file cabinets witnessing me.

Red is the pillows on her sofa, where that traitor sat.

Red is the tip of a cigarette, taunting me with cures.

Red is the sunshine granting another day and acknowledging another night.

Red is the color that is strobing in my eyes; carrying me away from her.

Red is the color I cannot see.

Red is the only color I see.


	7. weight

Post demons

/weight/ scully

/

There are some days when I cannot decide if Mulder is a selfless person, or if he is a selfish one. I suppose all humans are both, but generally you can detect a sway in one direction. I am altogether certain that Mulder believes himself to be selfless even when he is acting selfishly. I've born the brunt of that particular shortcoming more times than I can recall, but it is part of him, and I love him, so I do not hold it over him.

But today. Today I cannot take the weight of him.

I cannot accept the weight of defending his actions. His refusal to be hospitalized. His stubborn need to put finding the truth above the needs and concerns of those around him. He is so blinded by his passion that he cannot see that today I am hurting. Really hurting. And I cannot take the weight of him.

But I do. I catch him and arrest his fall to the ground. I push aside my own headache and nausea and force the police to clear him of wrongdoing. And then damned if I don't walk into that dark house when he warns me away. Damned if I don't flinch when he points that gun at me. When he fires those shots.

He collapses under the weight of his weekend. And because I take his weight, my emotional center of gravity crashes downward, and I stutter to my knees beside him.

He is warm. He is familiar. He needs me, I need him. And resting my head on his welcoming back, I feel him take my weight for a moment.


	8. pray

/pray/ mulder

/

At Quanitco we are taught how to handle emergencies. Protocols of prioritization and first aid. These protocols are hammered into the very lining of our bones until it is impossible to not react appropriately.

A firefight is simple. A hostage situation is from a textbook. A bullet wound is easy.

But nowhere in my bones, my brain, or my soul is there a protocol for losing the most important thing in the world.

And so I run distractedly through hospital corridors, forgetting that I am playing dead, forgetting that I might run into the wrong person. I only know I must find her. I have to, have to, have to.

Nurses in turn ignore and turn me away. I think I yell at Skinner; I'm not sure. Two words are pulsing through my brain. My new protocol: Scully. ICU.

Scully.

ICU. Intensive Care Unit.

Scully.

ICU.

Scully.

Pale, unconscious, tubes, beeping, IVs, cancer. Cancer.

Oh. God. No.

OhGodNo.

Ohgodno.

No no.

And my head automatically falls forward and my knees collapse in some perverse kind of devotion. And it is an honest and desperate prayer that I did not know I could ask.

Oh, God, no.

Please God. No.

I don't believe. But she does. So maybe.

Please, God. No.


	9. human

/human/ scully

/

"I'm tired," I say quietly. Mom and Bill accept this without question. "Why don't you two go get some rest too," I suggest.

They take their time leaving; and I understand why. As they, Father McQue, and Skinner finally migrate to the doorway, I catch Skinner's eye.

 _Is Mulder still outside?_

Skinner nods upwards to indicate that he understands.

The door closes. Silence encases me for a moment, rich in its thickness. Nourishing like ocean air. Stifling like the air inside a coffin.

The door opens, and my tired heart buoys up on his careful smile.

"Scully?"

"Mulder." I hold out my hand to him – the one I only grudgingly released early this morning. He clasps it and slides easily onto the bed next to me, just as he did before.

Tangled in IV's and hospital tags, I reach for him desperately and pull him into a crushing embrace. He kisses my forehead, my hair, running his hands down my spine. I want him to swallow me; to meld into the warm and strong limbs wound around me. There is so very little of me left right now, so very little that has been salvaged. I don't know whether it was God, Mulder, or both of them together that have salvaged my broken body from a casket. God is fairly inaccessible sometimes. Mulder is like my shadow.

I raise my head and kiss his cheek near his ear. "Thank you," I whisper.

He cuddles me closer, and I can feel his smile. "I'm not going to lose you," he whispers back. It is a wondrous, grateful realization.

And I won't be lost. No longer an inanimate object with no agency, something to be lost when the universe forgets about it. I am no longer a tumor and a space holder. I am again a human being, with all rights and privileges restored.

Just to make sure, I place a hand against my heart, feeling it beat faithfully. Afterwards, I press my open palm to his heart. _Don't break._


	10. get lucky

/get lucky/ mulder

/

She is cold, she tells me. As if the apartment heater set at 80' wasn't an indication. The steaming mug on the counter. The white bathrobe she is wrapped in that I suspect indicates both a recent hot shower and several layers of flannel underneath.

I wonder about this. Her cancer went into remission two weeks ago, and according to the doctors she is nearing the end of her immediate convalescence. She should not be feeling perpetually cold. Should she?

"What can I do?"

She shrugs and looks away, her breath bated on a response. She will say that it will pass. That it is a logical byproduct of all the eating she has been told to do. No blood in her extremities. Fluctuating body mass. Altered circulation. Shock. Relief. Something to pin the freezing fingers to.

The television buzzes softly behind me. The couch has thick comforter strewn across it, from which I am certain she just emerged. From a cocoon.

Will she have wings now?

She must have, to have escaped death's snapping jaws and snatching hands.

I reach for her icy fingers and pull her, steaming mug and all, back to the couch. I settle myself onto the couch as if it was my own. My shoes kicked off, my legs up. I guide her down onto me, wrapping the blanket around us. She looks at me cautiously for exactly two seconds before curling around me and drawing her arms around my chest.

Minutes pass, then an hour. The program changes. Her weight has become heavier and her breathing settled. I slip my fingers through her cool, silk hair, breathing her in and praising a God I don't believe in that I can still have her.

xx

AN/ Thank you for reading. I feel like these vignettes may not be 100% true to the characters, but contain a lot of my own sentimentality concerning the cancer arc. I'm also in awe of the beautiful monologues Mulder and Scully have throughout the series, and wanted to capture hints of that here, because those moments are incredibly honest and beautiful. Please leave a review, or at least a favorite!


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